Gina
Gina got in touch with me recently and at first I was a little bit apprehensive.
I haven't really been in touch with her since moving to Scotland, and from what little bits about her life I gleamed, it seemed that we were traveling in completely different trajectories. We shared a lot together and when we met we both just left home for the first time and were clutching our dreams close to us, sure that in a few years' time somehow our lives will have taken on the shining of stars. It was the years of the dot com boom in the Bay Area and friends all around us were making fortunes with crazy ideas, conceptual art, and almost everybody seemed at least able to find some administration job that paid the rent and paid for partying. We assumed that by the time we were done with uni, we would join those ranks and even if it took us a while to realize our more idealist dreams, we would get there comfortably someday. While we bemoaned the fact that so many among our ranks seemed to get caught up in the comfortable yuppy lifestyle, I think we were secretly reassured by the fact that we would at least be able to have that and that student poverty was a choice and could be cast aside for a more comfortable, if more status quo adult life.
Obviously those days are over. We never actually got to the point of being comfortable yuppies together, filled with self loathing for choosing comfort over ideals. I chose to move to Scotland and chose to live a life rich in happiness and contentment, but poor in grand adventures full of immeasurable risk and reward. Gina chose to move to New York on a whim and I suppose I assumed that because she chose instability, that our paths, if they converged, would be full of misunderstanding, judgment of each others' choices and perhaps a latent envy of each others' lives.
She is in Prague right now and although our lives have taken different paths and will maybe never parallel mine as closely as it once did, we still do speak the same language, just with different accents now.
I think we are visiting her this Autumn.
I haven't really been in touch with her since moving to Scotland, and from what little bits about her life I gleamed, it seemed that we were traveling in completely different trajectories. We shared a lot together and when we met we both just left home for the first time and were clutching our dreams close to us, sure that in a few years' time somehow our lives will have taken on the shining of stars. It was the years of the dot com boom in the Bay Area and friends all around us were making fortunes with crazy ideas, conceptual art, and almost everybody seemed at least able to find some administration job that paid the rent and paid for partying. We assumed that by the time we were done with uni, we would join those ranks and even if it took us a while to realize our more idealist dreams, we would get there comfortably someday. While we bemoaned the fact that so many among our ranks seemed to get caught up in the comfortable yuppy lifestyle, I think we were secretly reassured by the fact that we would at least be able to have that and that student poverty was a choice and could be cast aside for a more comfortable, if more status quo adult life.
Obviously those days are over. We never actually got to the point of being comfortable yuppies together, filled with self loathing for choosing comfort over ideals. I chose to move to Scotland and chose to live a life rich in happiness and contentment, but poor in grand adventures full of immeasurable risk and reward. Gina chose to move to New York on a whim and I suppose I assumed that because she chose instability, that our paths, if they converged, would be full of misunderstanding, judgment of each others' choices and perhaps a latent envy of each others' lives.
She is in Prague right now and although our lives have taken different paths and will maybe never parallel mine as closely as it once did, we still do speak the same language, just with different accents now.
I think we are visiting her this Autumn.
posted by brookstar | 1:27 PM
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